"I'll be the only politician in history" who "won't be allowed to criticize people," Donald Trump complained last month. He was referring to the gag order issued by the judge who is overseeing the federal case that charges him with illegally conspiring to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
While Trump's claim was characteristically hyperbolic, the order does raise serious constitutional questions that are surprisingly unsettled. That much was clear on Monday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit considered Trump's First Amendment objections to the speech restrictions that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed on October 16.
